Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Editor's Note: This post, which I noticed in my reserve queue this
morning, will probably be it for Emacs-centric posts for a
while. Interested readers can find a layman's introduction to the text
editor here,
and a caution about delving into potentially murky projects in the
first comment here. Learning
Emacs is hard, and, although I recommend it, I also recommend being
sure about why you are doing so. That said, I am quite happy with my
decision over a year ago to start using it, but recognize that there
may be a limited audience for such enthusiasm here. Oh, and I do like
some of the comments about computing in general
within...

Back in late October/early November last
year, we moved from St. Louis to Baltimore. Naturally, my desktop's
motherboard died a week or so before we began the move and my
netbook's case cracked during the move. I could thus no longer take
the netbook anywhere. (I would have risked making it inoperable by
closing it. It now lives up high, away from the kids and serves as an
upstairs terminal in addition to automatically creating news digests
for me.) So I had computer shopping to do, and that entailed
carefully researching potential purchases to make sure I could turn
them into productive machines by installing Linux. (Microsoft
is workingovertime
to make this difficult. Too bad they can't put half of this energy
into making decent, unbloated, and unobtrusive software.) It is at
such times that I become almost nauseatingly aware of how different my
approach to computing is from that of the vast majority of
people.

Most people want something that is easy to use and
adequate for the job, and maybe some further capabilities once they
master a given tool. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but
this approach comes with several costs: One of them is that one
must adjust to the software, which means (at least initially)
doing things the way the least computer-adept people in the general
population do things. This can allow a novice to start working
productively right away, but, unless there are good ways to get around
the hand-holding, click-to-do-anything-at-all, modern desktop
interface, there is a low ceiling on how
efficiently one can work. (Often, there are shortcuts, but
"upgrades" can obviate these or even break backwards
compatibility. That's a related, but different problem.)

I
have spoken before of my different
approach to computing, but Irreal blogger "jcs" puts it
better than I ever have:

... People often say that they
have to use an editor for a while so they can adjust to it. [Vivek]
Haldar says that's backwards. Your editor should adjust to you, not
the other way around.

Finally he says that editors are like
fine wine: the older the better. If you want a good editor, choose one
that's been around long enough that all the quirks have been worked
out and that every conceivable way of manipulating text has been
considered and reified into workable code.

One could
argue that Microsoft Word has been around for a long time, but has it?
Microsoft makes big enough changes to its interface and even its file
format from time to time, that it's more like a succession of products
than one, continually improving suite. By contrast, Emacs, of which
jcs and Haldar speak, has undergone steady development, and for longer
than anything called "Word" has been around, but without major changes
to its interface and no changes to its basic file format. Since an
"Emacs file" from 1970 (or 2016) is text, it is completely compatible
with any version.

This is a screen shot of my Emacs+Pale Moon custom editing environment during a blogging session. (In the upper right is part of another instance of Pale Moon being used for research.) A script periodically updates the web page on the right from the markup code I am editing.

One thing is worth noting: Saying that one needn't adjust to an editor
is not the same thing as saying there is no learning curve. It
took me a few months of using Emacs for blog posts each morning to
become comfortable using it, but once I did, I ended up being able to
customize it to create the writing work flow I had only dreamed of
before. I stripped the interface of everything I didn't need, created
my own shortcuts for things I did often, and learned that decades of
computer hacker users had already thought of how to do a few things
(like split-screen views of different parts of the same document) I
had always wanted to do without all the clumsiness of GUI-based office
suites.

For more up-front effort, I now have something I
need only think about when I want to do something with even more
convenience or speed. Oh, and my wrists are quite happy,
too.